Hired by EMC2 India for a project called as Event management & analytic's.As the title suggest the project is based on monitoring ,troubleshooting,administering the cloud ,data storage,virtualisation and Network and user security .

Our current full backup is about 1.5TB, that's accomplished through 2 backup exec servers dealing with half the networks servers. I'm interested in moving is in to a system that would be able to do the following:

1. Local disk based backup
1a. I'm assuming I'll be able to do exchange item level restores directly from the box without having to pre-stage the store I'm restoring from.
2. Creation of VM on disk based backup unit if a box goes down
3. Replication to off-site.

Anyone using any products that currently accomplish all of the above? Thoughts? Good/Bad?

I would point you to Venyu (AmeriVault) or Intronis, which gives you offsite backups with on-site local copies and the native, brick-level restore for Exchange.

I'd suggest an assessment. We often find we identify data as "archive" and can setup local read-only access mirrored off-site for safety. The online archive can then be removed from nightly backups, saving space, time, and money.

There are a number of utilities from VMware and others that can provide a backup of VM images to disk. I'll need to do some research on this.

I've been loking in the same thing here at the company I work for. One product that I've been looking at is Double Take. Again goes with the theme of pricy but it depends on if you are running VM currently or not.

I don't know who is your local reseller but I have a box that does everything you describe, It's running essentially a windows storage server, uses's xen virtualbox to convert the backup files to vm's, backups are incremental using shadowprotect, we have it backing up our servers at 15minute incrementals, don't know how it works with exchange as we run a hosted exchange here but i know it is compatible. It's from a company called zenith. We bought from a local reseller of it so we get our support from them, it works well for us so far.

Have you considered ARCserve Backup. I have to think it meets all the requirements listed. If you have any queries I am as eager as ever to clarify.

If it is Backup with Replication capabilities, we have the Xtra Value Pack promotion which offers great value.

DarienA wrote:

1. Local disk based backup Yes
1a. I'm assuming I'll be able to do exchange item level restores directly from the box without having to pre-stage the store I'm restoring from. Yes
2. Creation of VM on disk based backup unit if a box goes down Please clarify this requirement. ARCserve VM Agent has great features like File Level Restores from Raw/Image Backup and vSphere Support.
3. Replication to off-site. Yes, with XOsoft integration.

I don't know who is your local reseller but I have a box that does everything you describe, It's running essentially a windows storage server, uses's xen virtualbox to convert the backup files to vm's, backups are incremental using shadowprotect, we have it backing up our servers at 15minute incrementals, don't know how it works with exchange as we run a hosted exchange here but i know it is compatible. It's from a company called zenith. We bought from a local reseller of it so we get our support from them, it works well for us so far.

Ok you're running one of the zenitch arc boxes... either the new arca boxes or the old bdr's. Which if you don't mind me asking? We've looked at them and the product looks pretty strong (we know it runs shadowprotect which is what we use for desktop imaging), I've just not come across any folks who've actually USED the box to give me a real work assessment of it. Have you ever run a VM of one of you boxes as a test? Any insights?

Arun (CA) wrote:

Have you considered ARCserve Backup. I have to think it meets all the requirements listed. If you have any queries I am as eager as ever to clarify.

If it is Backup with Replication capabilities, we have the Xtra Value Pack promotion which offers great value.

DarienA wrote:

1. Local disk based backup Yes
1a. I'm assuming I'll be able to do exchange item level restores directly from the box without having to pre-stage the store I'm restoring from. Yes
2. Creation of VM on disk based backup unit if a box goes down Please clarify this requirement. ARCserve VM Agent has great features like File Level Restores from Raw/Image Backup and vSphere Support.
3. Replication to off-site. Yes, with XOsoft integration.

2. There are a few products out there (The Zenith Arca box is one of them) that work like this. The box does disk based backups of any servers you've designated. If one of those servers goes down the backup box itself can take a back of that server and create and run a VM of that downed box to function as DR til you get that physical box back up and running.

I have run a VM only as a test, it's not a powerfull server that will be able to run near true production capacity of any of my systems, however if your running a VMWare or xen server you can run the VM's right off the server and get much better performance. It's a pretty good system, didn't notice any slowdown's in performance with the backups set at 15 minute incrementals. There are a couple limitations on the VM's, you can only run one at a time(hopefully you wouldn't be in the position you would need to run more than that) , you can't set more than 4GB's of RAM to any VM. There is also a limit to the number of server's you can backup to the device, depending on which one you buy, the top end system goes up to 10 (which is the model we have). We don't use their offsite backup instead we do a weekly dump to an external drive and take that offsite. They do have a offsite component built in, and remote monitoring of the backups. Overall we are fairly happy with the system. The VM Server is pretty limited but in a pinch if your running it till you get some new hardware in it will make due. Just don't try to make it a long wait.

Oh and I forgot to answer your first question. We are running a system somewhere between the "BDR 2100r/rs G2" and the "BDR 3100r/rs G2" It's a 2u system with 233GB primary os partition and 2.7TB data parition, dual opterons.

I've been looking at the Zenith Arca for a while now, trying to figure out if it would fit into our plans. IshmaelDS - is the one server at a time a limitation of your model or the series in general? If that's the case, the sales guy didn't let me know about that.

I was sold on the feature set until I realized that basically all the functionality comes from Shadowprotect. I'm starting to think at this point why shouldn't I just build my own box with lots of RAM and storage, install a free hypervisor and run the Shadowprotect/Windows in a VM in the device to local storage. You could get a LOT more bang for your buck and likely make a pretty decent solution that actually could run your production servers at near capacity. Then if you choose to migrate to a virtual environment, you can use it as-is or convert it to a failover server.

We came to that same realization Bill and started talking to StorageCraft directly (since we use ShadowProtect Desktop already) we just haven't moved forward either way(it's not a high priority project yet).

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